Tim is originally from Northern NJ, where he majored in Communications concentrating in film & film studies. As his own career frustrates him, watching great films has been a continued source of entertainment and inspiration.

Heart of dotcomness: “We Live in Public”

Ondi Timoner is a documentary filmmaker who immerses herself in her subjects and clearly takes sides. With her excellent 2004 feature “Dig!“, she showcased two distinct bands vying for breakout success in the early 90s: San Francisco’s “The Brian Jonestown Massacre” and Portland’s’ “The Dandy Warhols”. She followed and filmed both bands for a grueling seven years. The dynamics of these two stories and the total access she enjoyed as filmmaker made for a great viewing experience and won her the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

In 1999 she participated in an unconventional social experiment called “Quiet” sponsored by an eccentric dot.com millionaire named Josh Harris. To ring in the new millennium he interviewed (and interrogated) about one hundred artsy folks who volunteered to live in a bunker in lower Manhattan where they would be videotaped 24/7 with absolutely no privacy for a month before the year 2000 dawned. Outfitted in matching jumpsuits, there were guns, a communal dining hall and lots of acting out. Timoner was there filming the experiment which had no real direction and became more than a bit cult-like. The police eventually raided the bunker and sent everyone home. This became her core footage and in “We Live in Public” she builds it into her biography of the man behind it all: Josh Harris. This film again earned her the Sundance Grand Jury Prize last year making her the only filmmaker to twice win this award.

Although she clearly thinks that Mr. Harris is a visionary, he seems more like a creepy megalomaniac playing God with the money he earned mostly off his early tech firm Jupiter Communications and then from his start-up website “Pseudo.com”. However I had never heard of this man and to see his story transported me back to the early days of the internet when start-up millionaires were the new masters of the universe prior to the dotcom crash.

Being young and rich, Harris foresaw streaming webcasts before technology caught up. Pseudo had numerous chat rooms going alongside live shows that resembled public access television. Partying out in his SoHo loft he saw himself as an internet-savvy Warhol and surrounded himself with young artists and models. He would sometimes dress up as a clown called “Luvvy” based on Mrs. Howell from “Gilligan’s Island“. After “Quiet” was shut-down he continued the total surveillance experiment on himself and his then girlfriend Tanya Corrin who shared his loft with 32 webcams. You can imagine how that worked out.

Timoner overstates Harris’s influence although our current world of YouTube oversaturation, Facebook and reality TV do resemble his bygone experiments of a digital public. Yet as we all know, just putting the banality of life onto the web doesn’t make it any more meaningful. To me Harris just seems to be an spoiled, immature man-boy who is unable to connect to anyone including his own family despite all the technology he hides behind. Without privacy we are dehumanized rather than connected. Perhaps his story works best then as a cautionary tale. Building such an interesting film around such a unique albeit unsympathetic man must have been a challenge. Tightly edited and bizarre, “We Live in Public” is an early tale of mad experimentation in the digital age. Two other documentaries of this period: “E-dreams” and “Startup.com” also tell compelling tales of the dotcom crash- only without the clowns, the social experiments and the gunplay, they may seem bland compared to this head trip.